First Speed Since March!

Sunday evening, I tweeted this:

My wife worked this past weekend, so I ran on the track at the gym in the morning while the boys were at the gym's daycare. The first 2.5 miles were consistent and felt good (half mile splits of 3:46, 3:42, 3:39, 3:39, 3:41), so I figured I could try speeding up a bit for 1.5 miles. I didn't go crazy, but I hit 3 half mile splits of 3:20, 3:14, and 3:12. I got it up to a good moderate/hard or maybe even hard pace.

Sidenote: my 7 different levels of effort are as follows:

Easy
Easy/Moderate
Moderate
Moderate/Hard
Hard
Tempo
Race

Most of my runs in the last few weeks have been easy/mod or moderate (a 2 or a 3 on my 7-step scale). This run with some miles that were closer to the other end of the scale felt good. I knew it would. I knew that "hard" running wouldn't hurt me at this point. I shouldn't be racing yet, but a little hard running won't hurt. (That's the difference between a 5 and a 7 on my 7-step scale.)

Time for a week of easy/mod runs again (I'm up to 40 minute runs this week), and we'll see if I feel like throwing in a few harder miles again next week. I'm not rushing it. I MAY have a race in mind in about 8 weeks... we'll see…

I'll be back with a post about losing/gaining endurance on Saturday. It's a "good news / bad news" sort of a deal.

Oh, and this happened yesterday: